Sunday Kind of Love
by IronicNarwhal
Summary: On Sundays, Jean gets ice cream. On Sundays, Eren Jaeger picks up a shift at the local ice cream stand. The two events are not unrelated.


Notes: Written for the prompt 'trans man Eren and Jean in an ice cream AU.'

Disclaimer: Shingeki no Kyojin|Attack on Titan and its characters are not my own. It is a publication of Kodansha with anime produced by Wit Studio Production. The storyline and characters themselves are the creative property of Isayama Hajime. The only content I own is the story below as you see it written. I do not profit from the publication of this work, nor to I receive any form of monetary compensation at all. The story was written purely for the enjoyment of myself and others.

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**Sunday Kind of Love**

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On Sundays, Jean gets ice cream.

On Sundays, Eren Jaeger picks up a shift at the local ice cream stand. The two events are not unrelated.

Jean walks up to the order window of the ice cream stand on Trost Street, two doors down from the corner of Trost and Rose, at two thirty on the dot. If there are customers waiting when he arrives, he waits until they leave. If there are no customers, or once the costumers have left, he taps on the order window. Sometimes Eren will appear in the window to grin at him in acknowledgement. Other times, the only sign that Jean receives that Eren has heard him are the sign flipping from 'open' to 'on break,' and the clicking of the side door being unlocked.

Eren's break comes at two-thirty on the dot, when he hears Jean tap on the order window and spins the sign around. Two-thirty marks the end of the lunch rush, anyway, and as long as he clocks out on his breaks, Eren's boss—an angry man named Levi who owns the stand, communicates with his employees via a phone against the back wall, and only makes two appearances a year; one at the beginning of summer to open and one at the end to close—doesn't care what he does.

Jean steps through the back door of the stand and into the air conditioned environs, which are almost too cold after the heat of a ninety-degree summer day. Eren greets him by stepping closer, looping his fingers into Jean's belt loops and pulling him close for a kiss. Jean skims a hand up under Eren's shirt, between it and his binder. The cotton of his shirt is damp with the kind of clean sweat that clings to someone's back on a hot day when they're wearing too many layers. Sometimes Jean thinks about life in a year or two, Eren walking around their shared home with only as much clothing as is comfortable to wear when it's ninety degrees outside, no worries. Thinks about it a lot, actually, because he aches for the kind of familiarity that would come with it. He wonders what the plains of Eren's back would feel like under his fingers, just bare skin, and he wants to press his cheek against Eren's naked stomach, kiss his nude shoulders.

"Hey," he greets. "How've you been?"

"Can't complain," Jean replies, slipping his hands into Eren's back pockets. Because the customers can only really see Eren from the chest up and he wears an apron, he's been known to wear everything from pajama bottoms to cut-off jean shorts on his lower half. Today he wears a pair of knee-length shorts that cling to his thighs all the way down, a tear below the pocket on one side revealing just a small patch of dark skin. He presses his fingers into Eren's fringe, pushes it back from his face and kisses him again. Conversationally, in a forced attempt at casual, he mumbles, "Missed you."

"You too," Eren sighs, easing Jean's heart "it's been a long week." Eren's usual weekday job is lifeguarding at the beach about twenty minutes outside of town. It's an understandably hard gig when traditional bathing suits don't really work for you and some asshole with a big ego and no social skills at some point decided that lifeguards are some kind of sex symbol. But Eren isn't going to quit, because he wants to go premed after graduating in June, and lifeguarding apparently looks damn good on an application. Jean wouldn't really know; he just finished his first year of film school.

Eren adds, "I'm just really glad to see you," and pulls away, to open the freezer and bend himself nearly in half over it to reach the tubs of ice cream. He knows what Jean wants, because Jean has been getting the same exact thing since the stand opened in May and they met. It's August now, and Jean goes back to university in two weeks. There has been a melancholy feel to their texts and phone calls since the realization dawned on the both of them about a week ago. Jean goes to school two states over. It's unlikely he'll make it back before Christmas. That's something to look forward to, though—Eren all bundled up in 20 layers of clothing because he gets weirdly cold even on hot days, so he can't imagine what he's like in the winter. He imagines he'd be cute, though; cheeks pink from the cold, hair plastered to the sides of his head by a knit cap, parka so big that he's swimming in it.

Jean leans against the counter below the window, next to the container of hot fudge, and mumbles, "So, um…I've been wondering. Do you want to do something? That's not, like sitting around this place. Before I go back to school?"

Eren turns around, hands suspended in the act of dropping a scoop of cookie dough ice cream onto a waffle cone. "Like what?"

Jean shrugs. "I dunno. Dinner and a movie? What do normal people do for dates; I've never really be on one." Most of his high school relationships were things with friends that turns intimate over time and then, inevitably, became a 'just friends' situation again when neither party really bothered trying to maintain the relationship. He thinks it might be because he was fifteen-sixteen-seventeen and didn't really know how to make a relationship work. He's nineteen now, will be turning twenty in April, and hadn't dated for a year and a half before meeting Eren.

Of course, Eren is seventeen, but…he's a more mature seventeen than Jean really ever was. For several reasons, some of them obvious and some of them not so. Things that Eren talks about a lot—like his transition, which he's incredibly open about despite at first being hostile when Jean showed interest in him, for which Jean doesn't fault him and never did. Other things, Eren doesn't talk about much at all—his mother dying, his father taking off practically the day after, he and his sister being shuffled around to far too many foster homes between the ages of ten and fifteen before finally, two years ago, settling in with a man named Hannes, whom is troubled himself, but not in ways that Eren is talkative about. Only makes vague references to in the form of statements like, "He's got enough baggage to sympathize with mine, and that's all that matters."

Eren laughs, something slightly explosive and hysterical, and clicks the scoop to make the ice cream fall off and into the cone. "You're preaching to the choir, here; neither have I."

"Has anyone?" Jean mutters, because nobody he knows has ever talked about going on an actual date, the ones you see in the movies with the candlelit dinner and the romance flick in the darkly-lit cinema. They talk about catching a meal in the cafeteria together, wandering around campus arm-in-arm, picking up hamburgers at insert-fast-food-place-here and eating it down by the river that runs through campus. He's beginning to wonder if the story of the quintessential young adult dating experience is a myth.

Eren shrugs as he slams the lid on the freezer closed and crosses the room to hand Jean his ice cream, sucking a dribble of it off his thumb as he goes. "Dunno. I only really have two friends and one of them's my sister. Mikasa doesn't really…date, and Armin's been with Annie since freshman year. So I doubt they would really know either." He leans there for a second, hands touching Jean's waist and eyes somewhere in the middle distance. "I wouldn't mind, though. Going on a date. A real one."

"How about next Friday, then?" Jean asks. "I have to start packing next week, but I can pack in the morning and take you out in the afternoon. You're off on Fridays, right?"

"Unless something absolutely catastrophic happens, yeah," Eren replies. He wraps a hand around Jean's wrist and pulls it down, so he can swipe his tongue over Jean's ice cream. It's a little pink thing that Jean likes to suck into his mouth when they kiss. Around his mouthful, Eren says, "But to be honest, I'd rather help you pack than go out and spend money that neither of us has."

"Well…I mean…is that really what you want to do on your off day?" Jean mumbles.

"It's spending time with you," Eren says, "Which, you know, I won't get to do a lot of in the coming months. Unless you don't want me to come over?"

"No! No, God, it's nothing like that," Jean assures, because his parents really liked Eren the entire one time they met him. They're ridiculously open-minded for this area of the country, although it shouldn't really be a surprise considering they met back in 1987 while volunteering for ACT UP. "It's just, you know, packing. It's dusty and my mom will probably cry." Eren looks alarmed for a minute, but Jean adds, "She does it for like two weeks straight before every semester starts," and Eren relaxes.

"Well," Eren sighs, "I suppose I'd cry too."

"Will you?" Jean mumbles. "Cry when I leave? Please don't. I'll cry too."

"I cry really easily," Eren mumbles, somewhat bashfully. "More when I'm angry than when I'm sad, though. I'm not sure why. Mikasa never cries."

"Maybe it's some kind of nature versus nurture thing," Jean mumbles, even though he's not entirely sure what that even means, and bites into the waffle cone.

"Mmm," Eren mumbles in some vague form of agreement, presses his head against Jean's shoulder and closes his eyes. "My break is over in two minutes, baby."

"That did not feel like fifteen minutes," Jean groans.

"It never does." Eren backs away, to clock back in and to turn the sign around. Jean finishes his cone and presses his back against the door in preparation to leave, even though he's not quite ready. Eren glances outside to see if there are any waiting customers, assures that there are none and comes to kiss Jean goodbye. When he pulls away, he says, "Friday, right?"

"Yeah," Jean says, "I'll pick you up. Maybe we'll get Taco Bell or something before we go back to my place." Eren likes Taco Bell, and Jean likes watching the almost sexual way he eats spicy food, so it's a win-win.

"Sounds good," Eren says, and opens the door behind Jean with a look of utmost apology on his face. "I've got to get back to work; I'm sorry. I'll call you tonight though, okay?"

"Sure," Jean replies, and steps outside into the sweltering heat. Quickly, he adds, "I'll miss you."

Eren smiles. "I'll miss you, too."

Someday, Jean thinks, _I'll miss you_ will be replaced by _I love you_, and he can't wait for that day.

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Notes: Thank you for reading!


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